Cloudy With a Chance of a Silver Lining
Our multi-terabyte tape-based backup system and associated servers are headed to the recycler. When they were first installed some years ago I can remember the tall black rack and server stack, with its blinking lights and whirring fans, being a destination on our agency tour – proudly telling clients how we managed creative assets and what a big investment our agency had made in the latest technology. Not today.
Today, we have a big pipe that goes straight into the cloud. We develop in the cloud. We share in the cloud. We manage and administrate in the cloud. And we back up in the cloud. Terabytes upon terabytes all in the cloud. What prompted us to move to this architecture? To trust off-site, third party vendors with the intellectual property that is our life work? Quite simply, a timely alignment of seeing what our IT clients were doing, changes in our work patterns and requirements, assessing the cost of internal versus hosted storage and management, and lastly, the recession.
As we watched more and more of our IT clients developing SOA and SAAS applications due to market demand, it became pretty obvious that business faith in the robustness of infrastructure had increased to the point of business reality. Our own software development teams, sometimes scattered across the country and the world, had more and more need for online collaboration, management and trouble ticketing. Trying to stay coordinated with email, texting and VPN’s was clearly not the most efficient system. At the same time, we were finding the costs of IT support increasing, and the quality decreasing. Lastly, recession pressures forced us to look at every line of cost, making the decision to head for the clouds pretty much a no-brainer. Even for a group that prides itself on having larger than normal brains.
And so far, so good. I receive backup status on my smart phone, and our teams can work anywhere they can cobble some kind of connection to the Internet. From 3G to WiFi to hardwired, if there’s a connection and some bandwidth, we’re good to go. Costs are down, productivity is up, and we’re in lock step with what our clients are doing and where they are going. So if you’re considering taking the plunge, go for it.
The cloud is here to stay, and seems to have a silver lining.